In a voluntary society without a monetary incentive, who would choose to do the dirty work? Wouldn’t people avoid it (surely that’s human nature)? And wouldn’t that have serious consequences for society?
Talk to an apologist for capitalism and you will almost certainly be told at some point that the system’s competitive private property structure is well adapted to meet the demands of ‘human nature’. According to capitalist apologists our ‘nature’ is self-interested and competitive. How do they know this? Well, they say, look around at the way people actually do behave. Competitive and self-interested behaviour is to be found everywhere. As socialists, we have no disagreement with that. In property-based societies like our own, selfish and competitive behaviour is ubiquitous.
But does that define our ‘nature’? In reality, we know this simple model of ‘human nature’ leaves a lot out. We can begin by drawing our apologist’s attention to Douglas Adams’s parable of the puddle: one rainy morning a puddle wakes up in a large pothole. It scans the world around it and is delighted to discover that the pothole is exactly the right shape to accommodate it, and the same is true for its companion puddles and their potholes. The puddle therefore concludes that the world has been designed specifically for the needs of puddles. We can apply this analogy to our current society and ask whether capitalism’s private property system has been designed to accommodate an intrinsically selfish and competitive ‘human nature’ as the capitalist apologist claims, or, on the contrary, whether the competitive and selfish behaviour we see around us, is a learned strategy for surviving in capitalism.
Wide range of capacities
If we look at human behaviour with a more inclusive eye, we can see that even in a capitalist society, people’s behaviour is not solely competitive and selfish, but is often deeply co-operative and generous. Modern capitalism itself consists of huge businesses which employ thousands of people all co-operating together. In our domestic lives, family members support each other, they help out friends with time and money, and they give generously to charitable causes at home and abroad. Donald Trump’s withdrawal of USAID, for example, while applauded by his ideological supporters, has also generated a large backlash as evidence builds of the deadly effects of withdrawal on the populations USAID previously supported.
Human beings are capable of self-interested and competitive behaviour, and also co-operation, kindness and generosity. Rather than ‘human nature’, it would be more accurate to speak of a wide range of ‘human capacities’. We then have to ask what determines which of our capacities predominates in an individual or in a particular society, and under what circumstances. Research in social psychology points to the fact that though we have a capacity for both co-operation and competition, both are socially learned behaviours. If a society is organised on the basis of property relations that isolate individuals and set them in competition with one another, then the best way for its members to survive in such a system will be to behave competitively. If society is organised to produce what we need co-operatively and without private ownership or the profit motive, then this is how things get done, and everyone learns and values much more co-operative behaviour.
At this point our apologist will still insist that even if we have a wide range of capacities, without externally imposed incentives like money wages, individuals will ‘naturally’ gravitate to doing pleasant or interesting tasks and to avoid unpleasant ones. If you ask most people would they rather do something they enjoy than something they don’t, we can probably guess the answer. But dirty work is not necessarily unenjoyable. Many people in the UK and elsewhere do dirty jobs for low wages. It is also the case that all actions have consequences. And those consequences may in themselves be pleasant or unpleasant. Very often actions we find pleasant to do have unpleasant consequences that we want to avoid and vice versa. Humans are not robots, but conscious beings that can estimate consequences and judge how they act on that basis.
Psychological needs
According to research in social psychology, humans have three psychological needs which motivate us strongly to act. We have a need for ‘relatedness’ with our fellows, a need for autonomy and a need to obtain mastery over our environment.
Relatedness: Human beings have never lived isolated lives. We are social creatures and we seek to act and live our lives in collaboration with others. Moreover, we commit ourselves to looking after those we identify and bond with. In capitalist society where the property-based employer-employee relationship divides us economically and forces us to compete, we do not go to work to provide for society in general, but for a wage in order to support ourselves and our families. Our ability to expend time and resources to care for others outside our narrow circle of family and friends is necessarily limited, and if it cuts into the time available for employment, comes at a cost to ourselves. In a socialist society of common ownership and free access, productive activity is not carried on directly to meet our own needs. Our needs are met freely, and we freely give our time to meet the needs of the community of which we are a part. In such a society the circle of those we act for and identify with widens dramatically. And because we have free access to the things we need, the time we give to others never affects our entitlement.
Autonomy: We are motivated to seek relatedness, but we are also motivated to seek personal autonomy, the ability within society to freely make our own choices and decisions. Autonomy is different from ‘independence’ which is a powerful buzz-word in capitalist apologetics. ‘Independence’ has to do with not relying on others. This means that autonomy, the freedom to choose, is compatible with our human need for relatedness, but independence is not. Although capitalist ideology often likes to deny it, our lives are wholly dependent on others, from our first breath to our last. Human beings as we know from experience have a capacity to dominate others. But we also have a powerful drive: a capacity to resist domination. We do not feel comfortable when others exercise power over our lives. People can only dominate us, however, if our society is organised in ways that allow some individuals to stand in the way of our access to the means of life, as occurs in capitalism’s wages system. Dominance hierarchies of this kind limit our freedom and control. A voluntarist society like socialism which is organised without a dominance hierarchy allows us much more autonomy (freedom) and relatedness.
Mastery: Human beings in general are strongly motivated to seek mastery. It may be that we want to become a better guitarist, to produce better carpentry joints, to write better poetry, to bake fancier breads, to become a better astronomer, to invent new technologies. Our drive to achieve mastery in our skills and knowledge often provides good illustrations of the activity/consequence relation discussed earlier. In order to achieve mastery of the guitar for instance, many people are prepared to put themselves through hundreds of hours of a monotonous and often frustrating learning process while painfully developing the calluses on their fingertips which allow them to play their chosen instrument. Satisfaction may be the end goal of our activity, but it may not at all be a feature of the activity itself.
Extrinsic motivators like money tend to suppress our intrinsic motivations for relatedness, autonomy and mastery. In a voluntaristic socialist society without dependence on an employer, we become free to make our own decisions about how we act and how we develop our skills. Without the blinkers of the wages system, which subordinates our actions to a narrow self-interest, we develop a much broader concept of our mutual interdependence. To the extent that some work, therefore, remains ‘dirty’, our much-extended sociability and a shared identity allows us to find value and meaning in contributing to the communal process of meeting our collective needs. And because we have much extended choice, there is also much we can do to eliminate ‘dirty’ work altogether or to make it more attractive.
Questions to ask
1. Is the ‘dirty’ activity necessary? Maybe we are happy to live with the consequences of not doing it. The consequences of certain mining activities for precious jewels, for instance, we might choose to live without.
2. If we can’t live with the consequences, is the work really that unpleasant? We often exaggerate how unpleasant some work is. Many people happily do work that others find ‘dirty’. The dirtiness of ‘dirty’ work is often an exaggerated response to a society that identifies ‘cleanliness’ with status so that we respond to this kind of work with exaggerated disgust. Some people find pleasure in hard physical work, even if it is in ‘dirty’ conditions.
3. If we cannot live with the consequences of not doing the work, and the work is genuinely unpleasant, can we do it a different way? In a socialist society, providing for human need means looking after ourselves in all our roles including that of producers.
3a) Can we make the work ‘cleaner’? A significant amount of ‘dirty work’ in capitalism is only dirty because it is more profitable to organise it that way than to clean it up.
3b) Can we mechanise the work, wholly or partly?
3c) Can we make it pleasanter, by providing, for instance, a better environment, better tools or better protective equipment?
3d) Can we share ‘dirty work’ around more, so that no one does it as a full-time occupation unless they want to?
3e) Can we make the task more sociable, obtaining satisfaction through working together as part of a self-managing team for a common social goal.
3f) Can we find resources and means of having fun while doing it? This may seem like a flippant suggestion, but, if so, ask yourself why? Human beings are a playful species. Under capitalism’s system of employment, time and productivity mean money for the capitalist, so we are taught to be serious in our jobs, to work hard, and to keep our heads down. In socialism, we decide how to balance the effort or unpleasantness of production against how much we think we need.
3g) Can we make the work creative or instructive so that those doing it can advance their knowledge and skills?
Capitalism or socialism?
So, what conclusions have we drawn in this series of articles? We have argued that capitalism is a system based on the employer/employee property relationship which isolates individuals economically from one another and forces them to compete at all levels of society, and that competition frequently spills over into all kinds of conflict, from domestic disputes to gigantic, mechanised world wars. It is the source of poverty, climate crisis, pollution and loss of species diversity.
Socialism, by contrast, is a system of free access, free association and common ownership of the means of production by the whole of society. It extinguishes the profit motive and wasteful competition, undercuts the private ownership of capital and releases a vast amount of labour power tied up, for instance, in the management of capitalism’s monetary system. It undercuts the motivation for greedy behaviour, turns work into productive activity, and laziness into leisure. It also eliminates the need for extrinsic incentives such as money and provides genuinely human motivations like relatedness, autonomy and mastery.
Hud.
